http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/a633f-llll2017-10-16T17:25:00+00:00http://www.chimpfeedr.com/http://thegarrisoncenter.org/?p=11659Microsoft Corp. v. United States: Jeff Sessions Wants Open Borders, But Only for PoliceThomas L. Knapp2017-10-16T17:25:00+00:00Continue reading Microsoft Corp. v. United States: Jeff Sessions Wants Open Borders, But Only for Police→]]>

On October 16, Morgan Chalfant of The Hillreports, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the Justice Department’s appeal in Microsoft Corp. v. United States. The question before the court: Are search warrants issued by American courts valid abroad?

In 2013, Microsoft refused to turn information from a customer’s email account over to law enforcement pursuant to a warrant in a narcotics investigation. The information, Microsoft noted, was stored on a server in Ireland. Ireland, as you may have learned in elementary school, is neither one of the fifty states nor a US territory. It’s a sovereign state with its own laws. US search warrants carry no weight there.

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with Microsoft, and the full court denied the government’s request for a rehearing. Apparently they learned geography as youngsters, too.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, maybe not so much. But he does seem to have a perpetual burr under his fur about “national sovereignty.” Sessions is on record criticizing both “illegal immigration” (under the US Constitution there’s no such thing) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement as attacks on US sovereignty. So why is the Justice Department he leads seeking a declaration from the US Supreme Court that US search warrants override the sovereignty of Ireland? American exceptionalism much?

Hopefully the court will uphold the Second Circuit’s decision and make it clear to Sessions that the whole border/sovereignty thing goes in both directions.

But the tech sector and individuals who value their privacy shouldn’t just sit still and hope for the best. What we need is a the continued erosion of “national” borders and the perfection of individual borders that are, as a practical workaday matter, mostly impenetrable to people like Jeff Sessions. While the former may take some time yet, the latter are already partially available and the unavailable part represents opportunity for reasonably entrepreneurial “sovereign states.”

The available part, as you might guess, consists of strong encryption. The sooner Microsoft and other email and data storage providers implement well-crafted end-to-end encryption for their users — encryption the providers do not hold the keys to — the sooner the data in question will become useless to the Jeff Sessionses of the world. “Oh, you have a warrant? OK, fine, here’s what you asked for. Good luck reading it.”

The unavailable part consists of (hopefully more than one) “data haven” states: Countries whose governments are willing to write strong data privacy and freedom protections into their laws, believably commit to sticking with those protections, then stand back and watch as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, et al. build huge data centers and perhaps even decide to re-domicile themselves (presumably paying lots and lots of taxes in both cases).

Sometimes the Supreme Court gets things right, but it’s definitely an imperfect and untrustworthy vessel to entrust with the protection of our privacy and our rights. Better to take those rights into our own hands with encryption, and decentralize their protection across friendly sovereignties.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-4622594429032519925Who Knew Cultural Appropriation Could be so Comfortable?Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-10-12T20:01:00+00:00Those Thai fishermen know how to do pants (not an affiliate link, nor am I being compensated for talking about how great they are).

Less than $10 (with free shipping for Prime members, of course).

Comfy.

Light fabric, 100% cotton, great for Florida. They seem to be reasonably well-made. I wouldn't want to slide into second base in them or anything like that, but remember, I work sitting in a chair all day.

Waist size, 56 inches. Yes, you read that correctly. The thing is, they are designed to be multi-size. You fold over the slack to your comfortable tightness and tie two strings (sewn on at the rear). Which means that my clothes don't stop fitting every time I lose or gain weight (the last few years I range from a tight 34-inch to a loose 40-inch waist size and that can change pretty suddenly when I start or stop exercising regularly).

Just got my second pair (as pictured; the first pair is black and gray instead of black and red). I expect to get three more, and make them my usual casual go-to.

]]>Those Thai fishermen know how to do pants (not an affiliate link, nor am I being compensated for talking about how great they are).

Less than $10 (with free shipping for Prime members, of course).

Comfy.

Light fabric, 100% cotton, great for Florida. They seem to be reasonably well-made. I wouldn't want to slide into second base in them or anything like that, but remember, I work sitting in a chair all day.

Waist size, 56 inches. Yes, you read that correctly. The thing is, they are designed to be multi-size. You fold over the slack to your comfortable tightness and tie two strings (sewn on at the rear). Which means that my clothes don't stop fitting every time I lose or gain weight (the last few years I range from a tight 34-inch to a loose 40-inch waist size and that can change pretty suddenly when I start or stop exercising regularly).

Just got my second pair (as pictured; the first pair is black and gray instead of black and red). I expect to get three more, and make them my usual casual go-to.

]]>https://c4ss.org/?p=50086Just Repeal The Jones Act, Already!!James C. Wilson2017-10-11T16:00:00+00:00The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act, is a classic example of a law that has remained on the books for decades, only attracting attention when it creates problems too big to ignore. This clearly happened this August, when it delayed shipments of aid to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.

The hurricane destroyed 80 percent of the islands crop value and left the majority of its population without access to clean water or electricity. The always incompetent Trump administration initially refused to waive the Jones Act when the Hurricane hit but caved to common sense a few days later. The Jones Act requires goods moved from one US port to another be transported on an American made ship with American owners and crew members. This competition-killing requirement has created a US shipping industry that is among the world’s most expensive and least competitive. Restricting aid transport to this highly inefficient shipping industry essentially strangled Puerto Rico as foreign ships could have delivered more supplies, more quickly.

The harm done by the Jones Act is not, however, merely restricted to times of crisis. Due to its being an island, Puerto Rico is shut off from shipping via trains and trucks, making it more reliant on ships to receive goods from the American mainland than the contiguous states. A 2014 study for the Congressional Research Service estimates that it costs roughly twice as much to operate a Jones Act compliant ship than an international one. Additionally, it Jones Act compliant ships cost four times as much to build according to a study from Drewry Maritime Research.

These extra expenses get passed on to consumers and have resulted in US made goods being twice as expensive in Puerto Rico than they are in the Jones-exempt U.S. Virgin Islands. It also has contributed to the cost of living being 13 percent higher in Puerto Rico and food being twice as expensive as it is on the U.S. mainland. This has only added to the economic hardship and suffering Puerto Ricans have been plagued with over the last few decades.

The damage done however is not limited to Puerto Rico. Businessmen throughout the country have switched to other forms of transportation when an international ship would have been more practical. Others have found creative workarounds, such as shipping goods through Canada or the Caribbean on the way to their destination in another part of the U.S. All of this raises the costs paid by consumers throughout the economy. National Public Radio even once interviewed a Hawaiian farmer who chose to fly his cattle to the mainland by plane rather than pay the excess cost of using a Jones Act compliant ship.

Despite the widespread extra costs and potential for disaster in emergency situations, the only people who benefit from the Jones Act are the small portion of the population involved in commercial sailing and shipbuilding. Its primary beneficiaries are a small elite of American shipyard owners. The rest of us are forced to pay more to keep their noncompetitive businesses afloat. It is time to repeal the Jones Act and stop penalizing the general population for the benefit of a handful of shipbuilders. Indeed, we should repeal all such protectionist measures, as a free society does not need a state restricting our choices of how to buy, sell, and share.

]]>http://thegarrisoncenter.org/?p=11636Excessive: Bail Isn’t Meant to Enable the Holding of Political PrisonersThomas L. Knapp2017-10-10T19:52:00+00:00Continue reading Excessive: Bail Isn’t Meant to Enable the Holding of Political Prisoners→]]>

The US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment forbids “excessive bail” in criminal prosecutions. That prohibition seems somewhat vague. I guess we’re just expected to know excessive bail when we see it. Two current cases demonstrate not just excessive bail, but abuse of the whole idea of bail for the purpose of holding un-convicted defendants as political prisoners.

In August, podcaster Christopher Cantwell of Keene, New Hampshire traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to join his fellow white nationalists in a violent race riot. Cantwell ended up as the central figure in a Vice documentary on the event — and under arrest for felony assault.

Cantwell’s bail was initially set at $25,000, but on appeal from the prosecutor it was revoked entirely and Cantwell was slapped into solitary confinement (“protective custody”) at the Albemarle County jail until his trial, scheduled for November. Why the sudden turnabout? The prosecutor claimed that Cantwell a) was a flight risk, and b) had evil political views.

Cantwell was clearly not a flight risk. He turned himself in on demand, having stayed in Virginia and in touch with police in anticipation of doing so once he heard rumors of a warrant for his arrest. And Cantwell’s political views should under no circumstances have been treated as relevant to bail. The purpose of bail is to incentivize a defendant to appear at trial, full stop.

Meanwhile in Georgia, Reality Leigh Winner languishes in the Lincoln County jail, also denied bail since her June arrest for “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.”

The initial bail denial was premised on the possibility that she might have taken, and might disclose, more classified information. But in a second bail hearing, as in Cantwell’s case, the judge’s denial of bail was obviously conditioned solely on the content of Winner’s supposed political beliefs.

Winner was not a significant flight risk. She had no criminal record, her passport had been confiscated, and her mother had offered to move to Georgia to act as her pre-trial custodian. The prosecutor’s only real argument for denying bail was the claim that Winner’s admitted admiration for fellow whistle-blowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange indicated “contempt for our country and our security.” The judge bought that argument.

Again: The sole legitimate purpose of bail is to ensure that the defendant shows up for trial so as to not forfeit some significant amount of money or property.

Conditioning bail on the defendant’s political beliefs — or, worse, denying it entirely over those beliefs — is by definition “excessive.” Judges who commit such violations of the Eighth Amendment in particular and of due process in general should be removed from the bench — and possibly given a taste of confinement themselves.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-4205070715139647434On Decapitation, Literal and FigurativeThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-10-10T14:04:00+00:00reports that "North Korean hackers are believed to have stolen a large amount of classified military documents, including a South Korean and U.S. plan to 'decapitate' North Korea's leadership ..."

Of course, we don't get to see the content of those documents -- we are just supposed to pick up the check and STFU.

In military terms, "decapitating North Korea's leadership" does not necessarily translate to "killing Kim Jong Un." It merely means cutting off communication between strategic decisionmakers (including top military HQs and regime figures) and on-the-ground actors (troops in the field and the infrastructure supporting the movement, feeding, etc. of said troops).

In my opinion, actually killing Kim Jong Un if war breaks out would be a strategic mistake.

For as long as he can exercise power and communicate orders, he's likely to be a poor decisionmaker.

Once his ability to exercise power and communicate orders has been degraded (which will be very quickly, almost certainly within 24 hours and probably much less), it's better if "his own people" (read: ambitious or desperate generals) kill him so that what follows (as I've previously predicted, probably an invitation for Chinese "peacekeepers" to come in with the US party to a ceasefire agreement) can be embraced by North Koreans as "we deposed Kim" rather than resented by North Koreans as "the US killed Kim."

Of course, we don't get to see the content of those documents -- we are just supposed to pick up the check and STFU.

In military terms, "decapitating North Korea's leadership" does not necessarily translate to "killing Kim Jong Un." It merely means cutting off communication between strategic decisionmakers (including top military HQs and regime figures) and on-the-ground actors (troops in the field and the infrastructure supporting the movement, feeding, etc. of said troops).

In my opinion, actually killing Kim Jong Un if war breaks out would be a strategic mistake.

For as long as he can exercise power and communicate orders, he's likely to be a poor decisionmaker.

Once his ability to exercise power and communicate orders has been degraded (which will be very quickly, almost certainly within 24 hours and probably much less), it's better if "his own people" (read: ambitious or desperate generals) kill him so that what follows (as I've previously predicted, probably an invitation for Chinese "peacekeepers" to come in with the US party to a ceasefire agreement) can be embraced by North Koreans as "we deposed Kim" rather than resented by North Koreans as "the US killed Kim."

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-3682474671949399269Personal Cryptocurrency UpdateThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-10-10T12:51:00+00:00Bitcoin Cash, but after one spike it seems to have settled/flattened in value -- and, more importantly, to not be getting a lot of adoption as a medium of exchange. It seems that places that are spoken of as "accepting" it mostly really just accept Old Bitcoin -- in order to spend your Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at those places, you have to use e.g. ShapeShift.io to convert/deposit it as Old Bitcoin (BTC), which defeats the whole purpose. You still get the Old Bitcoin fees. You still get the Old Bitcoin confirmation wait times. And you pay a fee to convert them as well.

What I want out of a cryptocurrency is something that I can use to buy a soda and hot dog at a convenience store in roughly the same time it would take to use a debit card, and with lower transaction costs. That utility, of course, lying atop some measure of anonymity and resistance to state seizure.

Maybe I'll get that at some point -- I'm keeping my eyes on e.g. Dash, ZCash, Monero and so forth to see if there's a breakout crypto that gains enough user adoption, merchant acceptance, etc. to move in that direction.

But with regard to Bitcoin Cash, I'm definitely out of "holding my breath" mode. I just converted my tiny (mid-double-digit in US dollars) holdings to Bitcoin (at a loss due to fees, of course) and spent all but a few cents worth on a 1-year Ether mining contract at HashFlare (yes, that is a referral link).

Why HashFlare, and why Ether?

HashFlare: I looked at several cloud mining services, read a few reviews, etc., and HashFlare looked like a reasonably reputable, not fly-by-night outfit. Also, unlike most pool/cloud mining outfits, HashFlare lets you buy lower amounts of "hash rate" so that you don't have to jump in at a minimum mid-three-figures like some places require. In fact, you can get in for a couple of bucks.

Ether: I might have stuck with Bitcoin Cash, but mining that was not one of HashFlare's offerings. I am skeptical of Bitcoin's future. The big players seem to be reneging on the "2x" part of the "Segwit 2x" agreement. There's another hard fork coming and it looks like Old Bitcoin is going to continue refusing to get back to the idea of being a usable cryptocurrency on the "common man's medium of exchange" front.

I thought about going with Monero (especially since I have a bit in a wallet that's just a little too small to move OUT of the wallet), but since I'm doing something that's "fire and forget" for a year, I decided to go with the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap and hope that a year from now it will have returned more in actual market value than I put into it. Maybe by then the real players will have been winnowed down and there will be a real "common man's medium of exchange" winner that I can convert to and use to, you know, BUY STUFF.

]]>Bitcoin Cash, but after one spike it seems to have settled/flattened in value -- and, more importantly, to not be getting a lot of adoption as a medium of exchange. It seems that places that are spoken of as "accepting" it mostly really just accept Old Bitcoin -- in order to spend your Bitcoin Cash (BCH) at those places, you have to use e.g. ShapeShift.io to convert/deposit it as Old Bitcoin (BTC), which defeats the whole purpose. You still get the Old Bitcoin fees. You still get the Old Bitcoin confirmation wait times. And you pay a fee to convert them as well.

What I want out of a cryptocurrency is something that I can use to buy a soda and hot dog at a convenience store in roughly the same time it would take to use a debit card, and with lower transaction costs. That utility, of course, lying atop some measure of anonymity and resistance to state seizure.

Maybe I'll get that at some point -- I'm keeping my eyes on e.g. Dash, ZCash, Monero and so forth to see if there's a breakout crypto that gains enough user adoption, merchant acceptance, etc. to move in that direction.

But with regard to Bitcoin Cash, I'm definitely out of "holding my breath" mode. I just converted my tiny (mid-double-digit in US dollars) holdings to Bitcoin (at a loss due to fees, of course) and spent all but a few cents worth on a 1-year Ether mining contract at HashFlare (yes, that is a referral link).

Why HashFlare, and why Ether?

HashFlare: I looked at several cloud mining services, read a few reviews, etc., and HashFlare looked like a reasonably reputable, not fly-by-night outfit. Also, unlike most pool/cloud mining outfits, HashFlare lets you buy lower amounts of "hash rate" so that you don't have to jump in at a minimum mid-three-figures like some places require. In fact, you can get in for a couple of bucks.

Ether: I might have stuck with Bitcoin Cash, but mining that was not one of HashFlare's offerings. I am skeptical of Bitcoin's future. The big players seem to be reneging on the "2x" part of the "Segwit 2x" agreement. There's another hard fork coming and it looks like Old Bitcoin is going to continue refusing to get back to the idea of being a usable cryptocurrency on the "common man's medium of exchange" front.

I thought about going with Monero (especially since I have a bit in a wallet that's just a little too small to move OUT of the wallet), but since I'm doing something that's "fire and forget" for a year, I decided to go with the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap and hope that a year from now it will have returned more in actual market value than I put into it. Maybe by then the real players will have been winnowed down and there will be a real "common man's medium of exchange" winner that I can convert to and use to, you know, BUY STUFF.

]]>http://thegarrisoncenter.org/?p=11623Take a Knee. Take a Seat. Take a Chill Pill.Thomas L. Knapp2017-10-08T14:25:00+00:00Continue reading Take a Knee. Take a Seat. Take a Chill Pill.→]]>American students pledging to the flag in a former form of the salute, specifically the Bellamy salute . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners,” US president Donald Trump thundered from the stage of a September campaign rally, “when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out. He’s fired. He’s fired!'”

Many seem to agree that professional football games are no place for political statements. Well, at least they agree now. I don’t recall a peep from them for nearly a decade of the US government shelling out millions of dollars to turn professional football games into combination political statements and military recruitment rallies.

Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle reports, a Texas high school student has been expelled for sitting through morning prayers to the god called government, also known as “the Pledge of Allegiance.”

C’mon, people — relax!

Is it truly important that someone you don’t know didn’t assume your preferred bodily posture while a song you like was played?

Is it the end of the world that a high school student doesn’t practice the same (secular) religion as you?

I was brought up to respect the flag. The Marine Corps reinforced that tendency. A 48-star flag adorned my grandfather’s casket (he served in the navy in World War Two). A 50-star flag just may cover mine one of these days. My personal politics notwithstanding, I’m a little bit attached to its symbolism.

But at the end of the day, the flag is a piece of cloth that some people don’t attach positive, let alone reverent, feelings to. The cry that some people “died for” it is, frankly, disrespectful to those people and whatever their real reasons were for taking up arms beneath it.

The national anthem is a song that glorifies the killing of rebellious slaves, some of whose descendants are likely among those criticized for failing to stand while it’s played (ask the grandchild of an Auschwitz survivor to stand for the Deutschlandlied and see how he or she responds).

And the “Pledge of Allegiance” was written by a flag salesman to, you guessed it, boost his flagging sales numbers (sorry, couldn’t help myself there).

If it bothers you to the point of distraction that some people are, by your lights, insufficiently respectful of the Stars and Stripes, your priorities are way out of whack. And if the flag does indeed stand for freedom, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-3432862669087142202FreedomPop Seems Pretty CoolThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-10-08T13:18:00+00:00After some research, we decided that FreedomPop (yes, that's an affiliate link) made the most sense.

For less than the amount she received to cover the first year of service, she was able to get a pretty decent phone (a refurbished Samsung S5) and a year of one of their premium service tiers (unlimited talk, unlimited text, 1gb data). I expect that's going to be plenty of data for her needs, since she can just hook to wifi at home and work if necessary.

FreedomPop also has a free plan with 500 texts, 200 minutes of talk and 500mb of data. They sell phones for as little as $39.99, or for $1.99 you can get a FreedomPop SIM card and move any unlocked phone to their service. On top of the data that comes with whatever plan you choose, you can earn more by referring friends (there's that affiliate link) or completing offers.

So far, so good -- making and receiving calls and texts, downloading and installing apps over a wifi connection, etc. Tamara is traveling at the moment, so I haven't heard whether or not she's had occasion to really put cellular data to the test.

She wanted to keep the phone number she's had for more than 20 years. Instead of porting it from her previous carrier to FreedomPop, I am in the process of porting it to Google Voice. That way she never has to mess with porting it again. When she changes carriers or phones she can just change the forwarding.

Absent some horrifying as yet unseen development (I'll update this post in that case), I'm sold on FreedomPop. If I'm in a future position where a client isn't keeping me on their cell plan, that's where I'll plan on going. Maybe you should consider it too. One tip: Don't go for their cheapest phones. Old Android rigs are, so far as I can tell, slow and cranky.

]]>After some research, we decided that FreedomPop (yes, that's an affiliate link) made the most sense.

For less than the amount she received to cover the first year of service, she was able to get a pretty decent phone (a refurbished Samsung S5) and a year of one of their premium service tiers (unlimited talk, unlimited text, 1gb data). I expect that's going to be plenty of data for her needs, since she can just hook to wifi at home and work if necessary.

FreedomPop also has a free plan with 500 texts, 200 minutes of talk and 500mb of data. They sell phones for as little as $39.99, or for $1.99 you can get a FreedomPop SIM card and move any unlocked phone to their service. On top of the data that comes with whatever plan you choose, you can earn more by referring friends (there's that affiliate link) or completing offers.

So far, so good -- making and receiving calls and texts, downloading and installing apps over a wifi connection, etc. Tamara is traveling at the moment, so I haven't heard whether or not she's had occasion to really put cellular data to the test.

She wanted to keep the phone number she's had for more than 20 years. Instead of porting it from her previous carrier to FreedomPop, I am in the process of porting it to Google Voice. That way she never has to mess with porting it again. When she changes carriers or phones she can just change the forwarding.

Absent some horrifying as yet unseen development (I'll update this post in that case), I'm sold on FreedomPop. If I'm in a future position where a client isn't keeping me on their cell plan, that's where I'll plan on going. Maybe you should consider it too. One tip: Don't go for their cheapest phones. Old Android rigs are, so far as I can tell, slow and cranky.

Every time there’s a “public mass shooting” (defined by the Congressional Research Service as an incident in which four or more people are indiscriminately killed, not including the shooter or shooters, in a relatively public place) in America, the usual suspects climb atop of the pile of bodies before they’re even cold and start doing the funky chicken to the tune of “gun control, gun control, this wouldn’t happen if we just added one more gun control law to the hundreds of gun control laws that we already have.”

They’re always wrong, their political posturing is always ghoulish and disgusting, and any policy outcomes they achieve are stupid and pointless at best and an outrage against the rights of the people at worst.

This time, it looks like the former. US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) is pushing legislation to ban “bump stocks,” devices which allow one to fire a semi-automatic weapon (which fires one shot per pull of the trigger) at rates not unlike those of an automatic weapon (hundreds of rounds per minute for as long as the trigger is depressed, unless the gun runs out of ammo, or it jams, or its barrel melts).

“Bump firing” devices are pretty simple. They’re based on holding the trigger finger in place and using the recoil of the weapon to, you guessed it, bump the trigger against the finger repeatedly.

Because they’re so simple, anyone who really wants one will get or make one, ban or no ban. And, because they make a weapon’s fire incredibly inaccurate and difficult to control, hardly anyone DOES want one for any purpose other than impersonating Rambo in YouTube videos.

If the Vegas shooter did use a bump stock, as seems to be the case, it probably saved some lives. A reasonably proficient marksman would likely have killed more people with aimed shots from a semi-automatic, or even bolt action single shot, rifle under the circumstances (thousands of people packed together, less than 500 yards away, with a clear line of sight and no counter-sniper fire to worry about).

Republican politicians and the National Rifle Association are already jumping on the bump stock ban wagon. I’m not surprised. There’s no “there” there. The whole idea is even dumber, and less pernicious in effect, than the 1994 ban on “assault weapons” (defined as guns that people like Dianne Feinstein think look scary).

This stump stupid idea has to be fought on principle, of course. “Shall not be infringed” means exactly that, and politicians should never be rewarded for publicly rolling around in the blood of murder victims while demanding that we sacrifice our rights to their ambitions. But I won’t personally be losing any sleep over Feinstein’s stunt.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-5046835811384038442The KN@PP Stir Podcast, Episode 138: What Happens in Vegas Slays in Vegas (Too Soon?)Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-10-04T23:11:00+00:00The KN@PP Stir Podcast is brought to you by an anonymous sponsor who lets me promote whatever I want, which this week is Essential Libertarianism. Check out Rodger Paxton's new podcast-format readings of seminal libertarian material from The Voluntaryist.

In this episode: Thanks For Asking! (candidates and foreign policy; three chords and the truth; military sci-fi) :: Feinstein does the Bump-Stock Boogie on the graves of the Vegas dead.

]]>The KN@PP Stir Podcast is brought to you by an anonymous sponsor who lets me promote whatever I want, which this week is Essential Libertarianism. Check out Rodger Paxton's new podcast-format readings of seminal libertarian material from The Voluntaryist.

In this episode: Thanks For Asking! (candidates and foreign policy; three chords and the truth; military sci-fi) :: Feinstein does the Bump-Stock Boogie on the graves of the Vegas dead.

The Trump administration and congressional Republicans released their grandiosely titled “Unified Framework for Fixing Our Broken Tax Code” on September 27. The plan looks a lot more like a grab bag designed by lobbyists than like any kind of carefully considered plan for “tax reform.”

It’s full of smoke and mirrors. For example, the one-page highlight sheet brags that “the framework roughly doubles the standard deduction so that typical middle-class families will keep more of their paycheck.” I’d hoped that this might be the start of something like an Incremental Tax Exemption program (themite.org). But as I dug into the details, it turned out to be a bait and switch scam: “To simplify the tax rules, the additional standard deduction and personal exemptions for the taxpayer and spouse are consolidated into this larger standard deduction.” The plan takes as much more from you on one side of the equation as it leaves with you on the other.

When critics point out that the plan’s tax cuts are weighted heavily toward the wealthiest Americans, they’re right. It’s full-on “supply side” hokum: Cut the corporate and other business rates and wealth will “trickle down” as entrepreneurs innovate and create jobs. But “demand side” cuts would actually convey more information to those entrepreneurs, guiding their innovation as they chase the additional dollars left in the pockets of regular consumers.

I’m all for tax cuts and not terribly particular about where they fall. But let’s be honest: Cutting the corporate and top rates isn’t about sound economics, it’s about whose lobbyists buy the most expensive lunches for, and who contributes most reliably to the campaigns of, which politicians.

Of course, the main criticism coming from opponents of tax cuts as such is that those cuts would “cost” the US government something. The New York Times claims (drawing on an analysis by the Tax Policy Center) that “the corporate tax cuts will cost nearly $7 trillion over the next two decades …. the entire package is expected to cost an estimated $5.6 trillion over the next 20 years.”

Well, no. The total “cost” of the proposed tax cuts would be a whopping zero dollars and zero cents.

If I’m mugged one night and it turns out I left my wallet at home, that fact doesn’t “cost” the mugger the $20 that was in it. The $20 wasn’t his in the first place. It was mine. If I walk past a restaurant without buying something to eat, it doesn’t “cost” the restaurateur anything. Ditto for money that government doesn’t take from you or me.

Politicians want us to believe that our money naturally belongs to government and that letting us keep any of it is generosity on their part. But politicians don’t create wealth. They just seize it from the rest of us, or borrow it from lenders who expect them to seize it from us later.

The Republican plan looks like a combination of weak tea, scammy distractions and voodoo economics to me. But I guess we could do (and have done) worse.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

]]>https://c4ss.org/?p=50070Does Universal Basic Income Require a State?Lexi Linnell2017-10-02T17:47:00+00:00Recently, Vishal Wilde advocated for a universal basic income (UBI) on the grounds that it promotes economic freedom and social justice. Indeed, UBI has long been attractive to libertarians of various stripes. However, this idea suffers from the problem that, to date, UBI proposals have generally relied on the state for a taxation and distribution mechanism. From the libertarian point of view, a voluntary UBI would be highly preferable. As Wilde notes:

Although it’s worth noting that all contemporary, publicly-funded services have coercive origins, a voluntarily-funded UBI would obviously be ideal. Ensuring that a voluntary UBI utilized suitable mechanisms for delivering and enhancing trust is an unenviable but profoundly important challenge. Even if this can be accomplished, the difficult task of convincing people to adopt these mechanisms remains.

That is, while a wide variety of people have an interest in a social safety net — particularly in a freed market economy where there may be more social mobility — nobody particularly wants to pay for it. This is the reason why the state is typically thought of as the source of a UBI: they have the ability to compel people to pay whether they want to or not. There is currently one purely voluntary method of implementing UBI that solves this problem; it’s called Resilience, and it uses the Ethereum platform. The solution involves clever use of human incentives.

Ethereum and Cryptocurrency

Resilience makes use of protocols found in a cryptocurrency known as Ethereum, so it is necessary to first recap how Ethereum works. The history of any particular cryptocurrency is kept in a file called the blockchain. On a simple level, one can think of a blockchain as a chronological ledger, or list, of every transaction that has been sent through the system. Each of these transactions contains information about the sender and the recipient of the message as well as the amount of currency that has been transferred in the transaction. Precisely how this bookkeeping is done is not important here; it is only important that the blockchain be a universally-kept record of transactions, that these transactions can be “programmed” so that each transaction could implement complex functionality, and that the record is updated in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion.

Resilience

In order to create a protocol like Resilience, we must make three assumptions. The first assumption is that we have a list of every transaction that has ever been made. This, of course, can easily be provided using a blockchain. The second is that we have a method of assigning identities to participants. Every participant in the system must have an identity, and nobody should be able to game the system by creating fake identities. Finally, the third assumption is that the transactions can be programmed to implement the functionality described below. This is also the case for most cryptocurrencies.

If these assumptions hold, then it is possible to “skim” off a certain percentage off each transaction. The actual details of this protocol are fairly intricate, but the basic idea is that you can choose a number representing your “tax rate” that is skimmed off of all the money you send to other participants in the network. The money that is skimmed is then divvied up in a particular way to people who have sent money to you, and this essentially forms their share of the basic income (BI). An interesting consequence is that in order for you to receive a basic income, you have to send money to other people in the network. This means you have to pay the “taxes” you have told the system you are willing to pay. The system is also quite flexible in that you can program the system to take a different percentage depending on certain variables or program it to distribute your money to a variety of companies. Although these are called taxes, they are purely voluntary, unlike taxes levied by states.

This might seem like a pointless exercise since you’re both paying money and receiving money to the system. Won’t the transactions just cancel one another out? Actually, the amount of taxes you pay is determined by the amount of money flowing through your account, while the amount of BI you receive from the system is not. In other words, the average person will receive more money as BI than they pay as taxes. The only entities that are likely to incur a net loss in this system are businesses, which can deal with quite large amounts of money at a time.

The more difficult task, then, is convincing people to adopt these mechanisms. Obviously, individuals are incentivized to join the Resilience system because they will get a UBI in return. But what about the businesses, who actually lose money by joining the system? To solve this problem, one final rule is created: Anyone who sends money to an account that isn’t in the Resilience network is temporarily disconnected from the network. This has the effect of freezing their BI, as well as discouraging anyone from sending money to them. In other words, participants in the network are strongly disincentivized from transacting with anyone outside the network. The upshot is, in order for businesses to have network participants as customers, they must join the network themselves.

Therefore, businesses are incentivized to join the network because they gain access to a new base of consumers. However, since participants can set their own tax rate, why can’t businesses set their own rate to zero and avoid paying anything? While they could do this, it turns out that their customers’ BI would increase with a higher tax rate. A business which set its tax rate higher would have customers with higher BIs, so consumers will generally look for businesses with high tax rates. Presumably, this will reach an equilibrium where businesses are paying fairly high taxes but not so high that they don’t make a profit. In a sense, the tax rates themselves are set by the market.

Proof of Identity

In the previous section I assumed that we had a method of assigning an identity – and only one identity – to every person in the system. The reason why this assumption must be made is that anyone without an identity would not be able to participate, while anyone who could create multiple identities would be able to receive extra basic income. So, how could a system like this come about?

Unfortunately, this problem turns out to be the bottleneck in this entire scheme, and there may not be a good solution. Currently the most popular scheme is the proof of identity (POI), which extends the concept of pseudonym parties. In pseudonym parties people are required to show up at a physical event periodically (for example, once every year or month), after having been randomly assigned to groups. Each member of the group cryptographically certifies that the other participants appeared at the party, and these certifications form a kind of “token” which attests that the person is, in fact, a real person. After a year or month, the token expires and the person must attend a new party. Because it is physically impossible for a person to appear at multiple different locations at the same time, the system prevents any single person from creating multiple identities.

The POI scheme attempts to scale these parties to the entire internet by allowing these parties to be virtual, e.g. over a VoIP service such as Skype or Google Hangouts. This scheme is slightly more complicated than its offline counterpart in that you must convince the other participants in your group that you are not playing a recording or appearing in multiple virtual parties simultaneously. Aside from this caveat, the protocol is essentially the same.

As the others in your group are selected at random from everyone else in the world, it is infeasible to bribe others to falsely grant you a POI. For each sock account you wish to create, you must bribe up to four others. Even if you attempt to spam the system to create some groups consisting of nothing but sock accounts, this is statistically unlikely to gain money. Spam attacks can further be rendered infeasible by requiring participants to submit a deposit to participate in pseudonym parties, which are automatically confiscated if their account is flagged as spam.

Importantly, POIs are not IDs. They are certifications that a person only has one account with a service, but a POI does not contain information about who the person is. A POI also cannot be traced back to any previous or future POIs used by the same person, so participants can remain anonymous while still being certified as a unique individual.

The most obvious problem with POI is that requiring people to appear in annual or even monthly virtual hangouts is unsatisfying. If somebody misses a party due to illness, disability, lack of internet connection, or even mere forgetfulness, they are stuck without an identity. Since people experiencing illness or disability or who are unable to afford stable internet are more likely to need a system like this, this is an unsatisfactory solution. Nevertheless, this scheme’s advocates seem confident that it will allow a UBI system like Resilience to function in the absence of a centralized list of identities. Perhaps this problem will be solved in future implementations. In the meantime the question of whether POI is realistic remains unresolved.

The POI system also has uses other than in Resilience. Imagine, for example, a decentralized Twitter, which gave accounts a “verified” status if they could show a valid POI. Indeed, the fact that POIs are anonymous illustrates that there is no conflict between privacy and accountability. Although much of the conversation about privacy assumes this conflict to be insurmountable, the difficulty in holding people accountable online comes not from anonymity but from the ease in creating sock accounts. POI enables greater accountability without sacrificing any privacy. This is just one magical result of cryptography.Conclusion

The Resilience protocol may end up forming one part of a decentralized, voluntary, and freed market social safety net. Another part will involve various types of P2P sharing services, such as a decentralized version of Uber or Airbnb, run as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) on the blockchain. Since the sharing economy allows people to stay afloat during financial hardship, these two ideas may make a good safety net when combined. This combination of DAOs and the Resilience protocol also forms a decentralized version of the co-operative economy. Indeed, Resilience was inspired by both the Rochdale principles of the modern co-op movement and by mutual credit. This particular form, however, cannot be shut down. The only way the system can stop functioning is if people stop using it.

Further Reading

I’ve described the Resilience protocol, for creating a voluntary UBI system without a centralized state apparatus, in the most basic possible terms. This is to allow people who aren’t that far into the cryptocurrency space to understand it. There are plenty of details I’ve glossed over, and plenty of implementation problems that I haven’t described the solutions to. If the reader wishes to dive deeper into this subject, the following links provide a good starting point, in roughly the order I would read them.

Bitnation Announces a Decentralized Application for Basic Income Based on Bitcoin 2.0 Technology and Voluntary Fees:

]]>http://thegarrisoncenter.org/?p=11558Time to Stop Squeezing The JuiceThomas L. Knapp2017-10-01T13:27:00+00:00Continue reading Time to Stop Squeezing The Juice→]]>

A few minutes after midnight on October 1, authorities at Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center released O.J. Simpson on parole after the former football great had served nine years of a 33-year sentence for criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, robbery, and using a deadly weapon.

Simpson, who faces several years of parole/probation restrictions, says he’d like to move back to Florida, where he lived before his conviction. Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, who never misses an opportunity to grandstand, says that “should not be an option.” “Our state,” she whines, “should not become a country club for this convicted criminal.”

Bondi, of course, is very different from Simpson, and not just in skin tone or sex. He was convicted of something that wouldn’t be considered a crime in any sane society. She hasn’t even been charged with the real crime she undeniably committed (soliciting and accepting a bribe, er, “campaign contribution,” from the Trump Foundation for keeping Florida out of a multi-state fraud lawsuit against Trump University).

Yes, O.J. Simpson is a “convicted criminal.” But what was he convicted of? Demanding the return of stolen property while someone with a gun was present . He claimed not to know that two of the people accompanying him were armed, but even if he knew, let me repeat the two key words, “stolen property.”

In the normal course of things, Simpson would likely have filed a criminal complaint or a civil suit to retrieve the property. Why didn’t he?

Well, more than a decade before, Los Angeles police had unsuccessfully attempted to frame him for the murder of his ex-wife and a friend. No, I’m not saying he didn’t do it, but LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman and others artificially created a case that fell apart under scrutiny instead of objectively investigating the crime. I recommend J. Neil Schulman’s excellent The Frame of the Century? for a more skeptical look at the case.

Then, after his acquittal, the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman used the civil court system to rob Simpson of a prospective $33.5 million in damages for the same crime a jury had acquitted him of committing.

Why on Earth would anyone expect O.J. Simpson to trust the police, or the civil court system, to have his back on a matter of stolen property? If he wanted it back, he had to get it himself … and when he did, the criminal justice system came down on him like a ton of bricks yet again, levying a sentence that was clearly enhanced by a full order of magnitude as “payback” for the crime he’d been acquitted of.

Love him or hate him, it’s clear that OJ Simpson has paid the price, and then some, for the acts he’s actually been proven to have committed. It’s time for the Goldman and Simpson families, Pam Bondi, and everyone else, to stop using a 70-year-old man as a public punching bag and let him live out the remainder of his life in peace rather than in penury.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

And US Senator James Lankford (R-OK) thinks that “the Russians and their troll farms” (as opposed to Donald Trump and professional football players) are behind the current “take a knee” kerfuffle between Donald Trump and professional football players.

Because, you know, Americans never had rowdy disagreements with each other over race and religion until last year, and wouldn’t be having them now if not for those dirty, no-good Russian hackers who stole the 2016 presidential election from the second most hated candidate in history, on behalf of the most hated candidate in history, operating through subterfuge to achieve the outcome that some of us predicted months in advance, long before anyone mentioned Russian hackers.*

Evidence? Who needs evidence? The people who hated the outcome and have been railing against it for nearly a year now have told us what happened, and why, and whodunit, and they’d never lie to us about something like that, would they? They lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, and about illegal wiretapping by the NSA, and about a thousand other things, but THIS is DIFFERENT.

Keep in mind that when all the most wild and baseless accusations (e.g. that !THEM RUSSIANS! hacked the voting machines) are discarded, the basic claim remaining is this: By spreading “fake news” through social media, !THEM RUSSIANS! fooled a bunch of Americans into voting the wrong way.

Let’s assume for a moment that the basic claim is true, although so far the actual evidence indicates a tiny propaganda operation in the scale of things. If it’s true, the conclusion it points to is:

American voters are morons who can be gamed into doing anything by anyone with the ability to buy ads on Facebook and Twitter.

I didn’t say that. Russian hackers didn’t say that, at least in public. That’s what the propagators of the new Red Scare are claiming.

If the American electorate is really as abjectly stupid as the “blame the Russians” crowd insists, it seems to me that instead of blaming the Russians, they should get to work on either making the electorate smarter or coming up with a system that doesn’t leave important political decisions in the hands of the gullible. Just sayin’ …

*In May of 2016, I predicted that Donald Trump would carry every state Mitt Romney carried in 2012, plus Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. I didn’t predict Wisconsin and Iowa, but 48 of 50 states from six months out ain’t too shabby, is it?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

]]>https://c4ss.org/?p=50066Longview Anarchism: Transcending the Existential Threat of FreedomEmmi Bevensee2017-09-28T16:03:00+00:00Skin as Thick as Bark

As asinine, cultish leaders fascistically toy with the notion of nuclear warfare, we are reminded yet again of the fragility of human life. That humans have advanced as far as we have is remarkable. It reminds me of the feeling of awe I have when realizing that we limited humans drive hurtling boxes of steel around and don’t kill each more often than we do. Really, brava humanity. And yet, on a long time scale, we are less than a blink. After all, dinosaurs roamed the earth for 165 million years, and humans have only been around for about 6 million. Although dinosaurs did not reach the level of existential responsibility and consciousness that humans have, they were still wiped out by natural phenomena. Many pessimists see our extinction as an inevitability and almost usher it in, giving it a seat in their home with a misanthropic accelerationist’s glee. It’s wiser to recognize the exponentially harrowing conundrums that we do and will continue to face with an eye of hope. At the very least we should act in accordance with a path that hope might suggest. The game theoretic dilemmas of technological advancement present threats, but they also offer opportunities for freedom. The alternative can only be devastation and the void, so gambling on a future is, however unlikely to succeed, a sound bet. A longview anarchism represents both a determinism, and an infinite array of possibility.

The Fear of Knowledge

Each new existential threat to humanity increases both the rewards of coordination and the risks of defection. With the invention of firearms came the genocide of indigenous peoples the world over, but, like the boomerang of advancement, in time, those guns gave rise to fighting forces that overthrew the very same colonial despots. With nuclear weapons have come both the horrific attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as clean nuclear reactors capable of supplying unprecedented levels of more sustainable energy. The more easily we can destroy ourselves, the more meaningful becomes our responsibility not to do so.

Currently most of the largest human controlled existential threats are under the control of governments. The fate and responsibility of the human race is, in many ways, entrusted in the hands of a select few individuals. Unfortunately, two of the current lagerheads of this somber commitment are Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, mediated only by Dennis Rodman. However, as technology progresses, so too will access to the means of existential threat become more accessible to a greater number of people. Hackers could destroy the hospitals or power grids of an entire nation from a single computer if they possessed the drive and ability. Network penetration testers cringe when they go to large infrastructure facilities and see an outdated version of Microsoft controlling the lives of thousands or even millions. None of these scales of damage from an individual would have been possible a short time ago. Yet somehow we’ve made it this far despite the odds being consistently stacked against us from the moment we mutated to become multicellular organisms on a hurtling rock in the sky with water and oxygen. We must be doing something right in terms of the coordination problems we face and yet, our brittle mechanisms fray and crack before our eyes. When sociopaths and cult-leaders control our destiny alone, we’re screwed but distributing control of these threats and avenues of possibilities creates new dilemmas of ethical responsibility and coordination.

There are a seemingly infinite number of existential threats facing the human race or earth itself (ignoring for now threats facing the entire universe) and, increasingly, those threats will be available to the individual. When a 3d printer can print a genetic disease capable of constantly morphing and increasing its virality, a single person could devastate our species. However, if one person could print that so too could we remotely print antibodies to cure the epidemics facing rural Africa after centuries of structural denial and exploitation of resources on the continent. The trend is clear that, assuming technological advancement continues, humans will decentralize ways to both destroy and save ourselves. A tactical personal nuke may seem inane now, but 30 years ago so did an iPhone. We’ve already created and proliferated the ability to 3d print untraceable ghost guns. This isn’t just waxing teleological either. Technological development moves rapidly and, at times, with exponential acceleration. The bones for epochal shifts such as quantum computing and strong AI are also already underway.

Hope or Something Like It

“When many individuals use reciprocity, there is an incentive to acquire a reputation for keeping promises and performing actions with short-term costs but long-term net benefits. Thus, trustworthy individuals who trust others with a reputation for being trustworthy (and try to avoid those who have a reputation for being untrustworthy) can engage in mutually productive social exchanges, even though they are dilemmas, so long as they can limit their interactions primarily to those with a reputation for keeping promises.”

Those who are prone to panic dread the advancement of technology, simultaneously ignoring the countless lives that it saves and tangibly improves and carving out worry wrinkles with regards to its possibility of misuse. The nature of existential threats, though, generally follows a predictable game theoretic impasse: if you try to kill me, I will kill you. This simple stand-off of mutually assured destruction is the base reality for the cold-war model of nuclear deterrence and works in a great number of cases. But game theoretic dilemmas are generally subjected to artificial constraints in order to make sense of the decisions and dynamics at play whereas, in reality, a given dilemma may be plottable through game theoretic lenses but is far more complex than a simple prisoner’s dilemma can contain. For example, a base prisoner’s dilemma intentionally ignores the possibility that the two individuals being interrogated have a deep bond of trust in which a Nash equilibrium of refusing to snitch on one another is virtually the only conceivable outcome. Many activists during the green scare refused to snitch on their friends in just this way. The classical prisoner’s dilemma did not take history into account at all until the introduction of Axelrod’s iterated dilemma in “The Evolution of Cooperation.” Trust can transform the dynamics of artificial constraint, but the development of trust in a game theoretic landscape is complex and contingent on the rules of the game. Subjectivities are a difficulty in game theoretic thought, but it can still account for mistakes and miscommunication in a “trembling hand perfect equilibrium.” Although two guns pointing at each other might be the two-dimensional reality of many existential dilemmas we face, it can be opened to a transformative third option that changes the rules of the game entirely. Coordination and trust strategies in a non-zero sum game (a game with some benefit of cooperation, even if less than betrayal) represent this possibility in a simplified manner. The key to trust is that interactions be repeated, have a high degree of communication, and that there is a non-zero sum possibility. This creates reputation, an essential component of coordination strategies in game theory as it applies to real world scenarios.

In a game of chicken involving nuclear weapons, the possibility of deproliferation seems like a fantasy. As each side escalates, there is a clear incentive to strive to be the dominant force, despite the fact that every increase in power also increases one’s likelihood of personal devastation. And yet, it is possible to cool a cold war. The U.S. and Russia remain locked in a nuclear standoff, but the temperature is somehow vastly different than during the Cold War. The rules of the game have changed. The war games of nations and fascists concern everyone, even as we have little ultimate say in their direction. However, the more say we have in the direction of national leaders decision-making in this regard, the more the power of devastation has also been democratized. Currently the U.S. president has very little standing in their way from immediately launching a nuclear weapon, but are you positive that a national vote on whether to bomb the DPRK would really yield a more favorable result? Scary as it may be, people must share the burden of responsibility, both risk and reward.

Anarchism is nothing if not compass points for ethics and coordination strategies orbiting around the twin principles of liberty and empathy. Disagree as we may on the details, the basic premise that coercive power should be abolished and personal freedom maximized is, at its heart, an attempt to change the rules of an existential stand-off. No matter how unlikely, or even impossible, the utopian strivings of anarchism may be, they simultaneously represent the paths through the long-term existential threats facing our species and its role in the ecological universe.

The New Man [sic]

One limited vision of this ideal is a deprecated stand-off wherein everyone has the power to destroy everything else but no one will. We live in a lessened version of this now where individuals do have the ability to cause incomprehensible damage, but, for the most part, we don’t and don’t want to. There are of course exceptions to this rule. Eco-fascist groups like Individuals Tending Towards Savagery have developed an information hazard paradigm wherein their utility function includes the destruction of all of humanity —of course with them being last to die. In their earlier iterations they at least claimed to be doing it in a misguided attempt to prevent ecocide, but, as time went on, their nihilism, either perverted or distilled, crystallized into a fetish for violence, and they ironically expressed a lack of moral motivations. Niche and minute as this group may be (despite reprehensible platforming by Little Black Cart and the Anarchist Library among others), they represent a perverse point of gravity in the study of coordination strategies to existential threats. They represent the saboteur free-rider and the failure of “The New Man.”

The New Man is a palingenetic mythos that posits a utopian human, perfect according to the discursive forces of a given paradigm. The concept has found tendrils in fascism, communism, liberalism, anarchism, and transhumanism. The New Soviet Man was to be strong, intelligent, selfless, hard-working, and, most importantly, loyal to the values of Marxist-Leninist thought. Despite the anti-utopian bent of much of Marxist thought, the New Socialist Man represented the hope, teleological fate, and indeed, the necessity of Marxist-Leninist (as well as Maoist, Trotskyist, and Juche) theory in the human realm. The Übermensch of Nietzsche was one who could reject religion “and install his own set of values which are ‘Beyond Good and Evil’… who could reject the ‘God hypothesis,’ who could look the truths of pessimism in the face and still say ‘Yes’ to life.” This Übermensch would “cease to be an ordinary human; such an individual would in fact become a Superhuman.” This idea was later adopted and distorted by the Nazis to support both a policy of eugenics as well as the creation of a class known as the untermenschen that they associated with all “undesirable” races and proclivities. The Fascist New Man is traditional in outlook, hyper-masculine and “alpha” yet stripped of all individuality in its service to the übermensch leader. What these and other iterations of the New Man represent are attempts at grappling with the difficulties of imposing a utopian or universal worldview onto the limited shell of human decision-making. Such is the cry of every visionary: “Things would be perfect if they were just different!”

Faced with the dilemma of human imperfection and its tragic effect on utopian schemes, many understandably turn to a pessimistic realism which favors a wide variety of gun-facing-gun style game theoretic standoffs as methods of curtailing humanity’s savage impulses. From such views are derived things like the Hobbesian social contract in which we surrender certain freedoms to governance allegedly in exchange for public goods such as security. Hobbes, however, did not have the prescience to foresee the hyper-information era we now live in where all of our greatest threats are completely globalized beyond the frail imagined boundaries of nationalism. We can’t fault him for not predicting the possibility of strong Artificial Intelligence with a utility function at odds with human interests, but we can recognize that the social contract is worth less than the paper Leviathan was written on. Overcoming our own internal existential threats is simultaneously our best hope for being able to survive an external threat such as strong AI– or a giant meteor. Hobbesian misrepresentations of game theory would ideally be worthless, but they’re the fodder for countless cruel and patronizing policy and laws corrupting our capacity for coordination.

Anarchism says that liberty is interdependent and relies on the many forms of empathy as a vehicle towards transcending our siloed outlook while protecting our rights to individual autonomy. Since liberty is interdependent, both our threats and possibilities transcend the shallow boundaries we’ve constructed between us and our environment. The Anarchist Man is a myth and our struggle for it an infinite regress. However, that very same struggle holds the weight of our entire future on its shoulders. If we cannot learn to ethically coordinate, then we will not pass the coming tests for our species. If we can’t play nice, then we will die and destroy literally everything. Alternatively, as we transcend each level of existential dilemmas, we create a new playground of freedom and responsibility.

Longview Anarchism as Distinct and Common

“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation… even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.”

The notion of planning far in advance and learning from history are, of course, not novel concepts. The notion of a longview is written into the cosmology of a great number of indigenous traditions and worldviews. In fact many more collectivist leaning societies such as China historically have much more of a longview, both past and present than the United States. The relationship of Buddhism to this view of time is noteworthy. The discussion of ancestors in many African traditions resembles a similar attempt to honor the past and prepare for the future. Longview anarchism descends from these understandings while diverging, at times dramatically, from their conclusions.

There are languages themselves which lack definitive concepts of the Western vision of now. In contrast, longview anarchism does not demand a rejection of the continued present. In fact a temporal granularity and a relevance to the moment is necessary. Anarchism as a broad and nebulous field attempts to deal with a wide variety of issues both immediate and meta in nature. These many threads are attempts, however wonky and at times misguided, to navigate towards a future in which we can adapt, survive, and perhaps even thrive.

These adaptations will take infinite forms throughout our species’ continued evolution, possibly even beyond our current Sapiens form. After all, to have a stand-off with strong AI we would have to either posses equal ability or remain a non-threat (or aid) to its internal utility function. Though we will never be The New Man, much less the Transhumanist New Man, the progress of individuals on the many planes of anarchist liberation are to become invaluable gifts to the people of the future, who will face ever greater challenges on the journey to anarchist freedom.

Technology creates complexity which presents a clear path towards decentralization of power. It is no coincidence that internet freedom radicals are hunted voraciously by authoritarian regimes while secure communication channels and access to the free internet are repressed. This is because information is valuable. The withholding of information is a strategy of domination especially when access to information clears paths of freedom— either to destroy or to create. Governments cannot repress or prohibit technology. USB drives full of western TV shows are smuggled into DPRK and the history of drug laws shows that prohibition of anything, much less knowledge, yields an opposite and magnified effect. Information is subject to the laws of entropy which hold far greater sway than any national law ever could. Tyrants continue to use advances in technology to secure greater access to hegemony, but sentience hunts for cracks and anomalies. Curiosity will kill the king.

Anarchism that takes a longview demands that we recognize these tendencies of freedom and shift our star maps accordingly. Beyond the deprecated stand-off described in the section above, another ideal emerges —a world not where everyone could kill everyone and doesn’t but a world where every sentient node has absolute power over their domain and the complete inability to coercively remove power from another. Killing another is, of course, removing one’s most basic freedom of life, and, as such, an anarchism that does not seek a transcendence to this power play is short-sighted. Although we must play the cursed game of existential prisoner’s dilemma, it should only be as a path to towards transcendence. Transcendent thinking changes the rules of the game.

But this negative freedom is only the first step in a realization of the necessary path to our collective and individual liberation. This third path of the great existential standoff is only a stepping stone. Anarchism, taken to its logical conclusions, suggests that we have the power to contribute to each other’s freedom, not just to cease to reduce it. This type of power, the power to ethically coordinate in a non-zero sum game, is the beating, raw heart of anarchist striving and the only path for our continued evolution.

Anarchism that does not have this absolute interdependent freedom as its end goal only approaches anarchism, but dares not gaze directly into its fiery soul.

It requires “skin as thick as the bark of a pine” to face the precipice of our fragility and choose flight, but we can do it. In a sense we do it every day when we ward off the ethereal existential dread that is presented by our dilemmas. Anarchism that takes a longview says not only that we have to face this, but also that, despite our monumental tragedy and failures both past and future, we have made it this far, which is a testament to our capacity to take another step forward into the universe — caminar preguntando. This is far from a demand for perfection nor is it intended to be a clear outline but rather a plea for curiosity and a recognition of the scale of importance of this project that we all hold, like a delicate yet nourishing seedling in our chests. It’s possible to both resist and to cooperate. Freedom is our only choice.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-3250469968966882473A Brief Explanation of my Seeming AbsenceThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-26T18:32:00+00:00In 2010, I started building a list of newspapers worldwide for theCenter for a Stateless Society. That was a loooooong process of working through a paid subscription to a directory and resulted in, IIRC, email addresses for about 1,500 US newspapers and another 1,000 foreign newspapers.

I tried to make time to keep that list updated (removing defunct publications, correcting changing editor addresses -- you might be surprised at how many papers want op-eds sent to a particular editor who may leave and be replaced rather than to an address that remains stable -- adding the occasional newly detected publication, etc.), but that can be a pretty intensive process and over time the list began generating a lot of bounced emails.

When I started the Garrison Center, I left the existing list with them ... and retained a copy for myself. Since then, I've slowly continued the process. But recent developments add urgency to it.

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a bunch of emails from several addresses (I do that because Gmail has daily sending limits). I got the usual bounces ("the address does not exist"), but I also got a number of blocks. One of my addresses had made it onto a spam list, even though I don't send commercial email and even though I promptly and politely remove newspapers from my list on request.

So, it became time to start using a paid service. I've been using Sendgrid's free version for quite some time, always sending to the same subset of my list and trying to keep that portion fairly clean. Now I'm paying them about $10 a month to handle all of my op-ed submissions.

Advantage: When Sendgrid gets spam blocks that aren't true, they actually contact the spam list maintainers and work it out.

Disadvantage: Sendgrid has a "reputation" system based on how many bounces/unsubscribe requests/blocks/invalid domains (e.g. the publication closed or changed its web site URL) your mails generate. If your "reputation" falls below 80%, they want to know why, and if it falls below 70% you're likely to get the ax.

So, each time I send out a Garrison column, I'm going through the bounces/invalid domains (haven't seen any blocks or spam complaints yet) and either finding new, working addresses or deleting the publications from my list.

It takes time, but it's necessary. And at the end of the process, I will have a clean list of working addresses. And that list will be a different enough product far from both the paid directory I started from and the C4SS list circa 2015 that I see no ownership/IP problems with sharing it with others who want to do mass submissions of op-eds.

]]>In 2010, I started building a list of newspapers worldwide for theCenter for a Stateless Society. That was a loooooong process of working through a paid subscription to a directory and resulted in, IIRC, email addresses for about 1,500 US newspapers and another 1,000 foreign newspapers.

I tried to make time to keep that list updated (removing defunct publications, correcting changing editor addresses -- you might be surprised at how many papers want op-eds sent to a particular editor who may leave and be replaced rather than to an address that remains stable -- adding the occasional newly detected publication, etc.), but that can be a pretty intensive process and over time the list began generating a lot of bounced emails.

When I started the Garrison Center, I left the existing list with them ... and retained a copy for myself. Since then, I've slowly continued the process. But recent developments add urgency to it.

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a bunch of emails from several addresses (I do that because Gmail has daily sending limits). I got the usual bounces ("the address does not exist"), but I also got a number of blocks. One of my addresses had made it onto a spam list, even though I don't send commercial email and even though I promptly and politely remove newspapers from my list on request.

So, it became time to start using a paid service. I've been using Sendgrid's free version for quite some time, always sending to the same subset of my list and trying to keep that portion fairly clean. Now I'm paying them about $10 a month to handle all of my op-ed submissions.

Advantage: When Sendgrid gets spam blocks that aren't true, they actually contact the spam list maintainers and work it out.

Disadvantage: Sendgrid has a "reputation" system based on how many bounces/unsubscribe requests/blocks/invalid domains (e.g. the publication closed or changed its web site URL) your mails generate. If your "reputation" falls below 80%, they want to know why, and if it falls below 70% you're likely to get the ax.

So, each time I send out a Garrison column, I'm going through the bounces/invalid domains (haven't seen any blocks or spam complaints yet) and either finding new, working addresses or deleting the publications from my list.

It takes time, but it's necessary. And at the end of the process, I will have a clean list of working addresses. And that list will be a different enough product far from both the paid directory I started from and the C4SS list circa 2015 that I see no ownership/IP problems with sharing it with others who want to do mass submissions of op-eds.

]]>http://thegarrisoncenter.org/?p=11513Privacy and Politics: The Hypocrisy of the Surveillance StatistsThomas L. Knapp2017-09-26T16:06:00+00:00Continue reading Privacy and Politics: The Hypocrisy of the Surveillance Statists→]]>

The New York Times reports that at least six members of the Trump administration used personal email accounts to discuss White House matters.

Given president Donald Trump’s campaign and post-campaign harping (as the Times puts it) on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server and mishandling of classified information, it’s unsurprising to hear charges of hypocrisy from Democratic quarters. But the hypocrisy here a matter of political class elitism, not partisan politics. Those in power, regardless of party, want to know what you’re doing, but think what they’re doing is none of your business (except when they send you the bill for all of it).

The US government and its state and local subsidiaries operate the largest and most far-reaching surveillance apparatus in the history of humankind. Their intelligence and police agencies intercept, analyze and catalog our phone calls and emails, create and install malware on our computers to keep track of what we do online, and watch us via satellite and over vast networks of cameras in public areas. They track our activities using our Social Security numbers, drivers’ licenses, car VINs and license plates, banking and employment information, and electronic device IP address and MAC IDs. Modern America puts the Third Reich’s death camp tattoo system and the Soviet Union’s internal passport scheme to shame in this respect.

Whenever we mere mortals notice and complain about any aspect of this surveillance state, the response consists of operatic appeals to “national security,” “fighting crime,” and other variations on the theme of “we’re just trying to protect you.”

But whenever an Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange pulls back the curtain, revealing crimes committed by the political class, all hell breaks loose. How DARE these pesky whistle-blowers show the serfs that their emperor isn’t just naked, but also killing and stealing on a scale that would make Ted Bundy and Bernie Madoff blush? And how dare the serfs notice?

Excuse me for a moment while I break out the world’s smallest violin and compose “Dirge for the Lost Privacy of Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Jared Kushner, Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Ivanka Trump and Stephen Miller.”

So long as American politicians and bureaucrats continue to put the rest of us under a magnifying glass, they deserve no sympathy when they get caught trying to hide their own actions from public view.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Shared Article from NACLA

Many in Mexico think the government and political parties are hampering aid efforts.

Christy Thornton @ nacla.org

. . . In Mexico City and the surrounding areas, the response of the state has caused exasperation and anger. Outside the capital, in smaller towns in the state of Puebla, for example, no official help has arrived at all; citizens are left to coordinate relief themselves. But in parts of Mexico City where massive volunteer efforts got underway immediately after the quake—such as in the central neighborhoods of Condesa and La Roma, where multiple buildings collapsed—the military later arrived and cordoned off damaged blocks, kicking out volunteers and refusing to provide further information. This has created what one journalist called a “struggle” between the military and civilians, many of whom argue that the army and marines, with their heavy equipment and top-down approach, care little about finding survivors and have done nothing to communicate with those looking for their loved ones. The marines are also coming under blame—together with the PRI-aligned Televisa television network—for stoking the false story of “Frida Sofia,” the non-existent student who was supposedly trapped in a collapsed elementary school.

Elsewhere, aid collected by volunteer groups is being channeled by a state agency known as the DIF, which is headed by the first lady and the wife of the interior minister, and is nominally responsible for family welfare programs. That is, rather than distributing government aid, the agency appears to be appropriating aid collected by citizens in order to distribute it under their banner. A widely circulating video showed aid trucks arriving in Morelos from the state of Michoacán forcibly diverted by police from their intended destination to the DIF headquarters, where huge stores of supplies sat undistributed, officials said, because they did not have bags. . . .

]]>http://thegarrisoncenter.org/?p=11497Social Media: When Does “Actively Working With the Government” Become Censorship?Thomas L. Knapp2017-09-25T00:26:00+00:00Continue reading Social Media: When Does “Actively Working With the Government” Become Censorship?→]]>Criticism of Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a September 21 post, Mark Zuckerberg shared nine steps the site he started is taking “to protect election integrity and make sure that Facebook is a force for good in democracy,” by “actively working with the government” and “partnering with public authorities.”

The day before that, the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Theresa May, used the United Nations General Assembly as a forum to demand that social media networks “ensure terrorist material [read: content that May disapproves of] is detected and removed within one to two hours.”

From the current Red Scare (“Russian election meddling”) and other nation-state attempts to limit speech they define as foreign propaganda or support for terrorism, to ongoing efforts to “combat hate speech,” the cycle of demands from government and compliance by social media giants is speeding up regarding what the rest of us are allowed to read, write, watch, and share.

Newer social media networks like Minds.com and Gab.ai have been growing as the targets of these efforts abandon Facebook and Twitter. But those upstarts are themselves facing backlash of various sorts from service providers such as web hosts and domain registrars.

An increasingly important question, especially for libertarians (of both the civil and ideological variety), is:

At what point does “actively working with the government” and “partnering with public authorities” cease to be private, albeit civic-minded, market activity and become de facto government activity?

Or, to put it differently, when does it cease to be merely “you can’t talk like that in my living room” (exercise of legitimate property rights) and start becoming “you can’t talk like that, period” (censorship)?

My own answer: When Mark Zuckerberg starts using the phrase “actively working with the government” as if that’s a good thing, we’re well into the danger zone.

Fortunately, the situation is (or at least can be) self-correcting. Companies rise and companies fall. The positions of Facebook and Twitter atop the social media pile may SEEM unassailable at the moment, but there was a time when few expected a new generation of retailers to bring Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck to their knees. If you’re not too young you may remember how that turned out.

Social media already serves two masters: Its users and its advertisers. One more master — the state — is one too many. If Facebook and Twitter don’t stop playing with fire, let market demand for free speech burn them to the ground.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Shared Article from Reason.com

Archeologists offer a new look at a secretive settlement of runaway slaves.

Jesse Walker @ reason.com

]]>http://radgeek.com/?p=8919Aspirational History and the Color of American CitizenshipRad Geekhttp://radgeek.com/2017-09-22T18:10:00+00:00There’s a new political book out by E.J. Dionne, Norm Orenstein and Thomas E. Mann, called One Nation After Trump. Dionne and Orenstein went on Fresh Air the other day to talk about their book, their take and their hopes for a better political climate. Terry Gross asked them to speak a bit about one of the themes of their book — that part of what’s notable and different about Donald Trump and the political movement behind him, as opposed to past waves of right-wing politics, is the extent to which they have embraced ideas from the European far right.

That much is certainly true, and it’s worth noting. But what’s harder to go along with is Dionne’s effort to pivot from the influence of the European far right, into a countervailing political appeal to Americanpatriotism. Here’s what Dionne says:

DIONNE: The idea that Bannon and Trump have imported ideas from the European far-right comes from the notion that there’s been a great historical difference between what it meant to be an American and what it meant to be a citizen in many European countries. . . . American citizenship has always been based on a commitment to ideas. It didn’t matter where you were from. It didn’t matter what the color of your skin was . . . .

This is just wrong. It would have been nice, and better for America and the entire world, if it had been true, but it’s flat-footedly and literally mistaken. In 1790, when Congress passed the first Naturalization Act in the U.S., the language of that act directly stated that it mattered what the color of your skin was: you had to be a free white person to qualify for naturalized American citizenship:

Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof, on application to any common law court of record, in any one of the states wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such court, that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation prescribed by law, to support the constitution of the United States, which oath or affirmation such court shall administer; . . .

Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia by the captain or commanding officer of the company, within whose bounds such citizen shall reside, and that within twelve months after the passing of this act.

Every amendment to the Naturalization Act passed from 1790 up until 1952 repeated the free white person formula, or a close variation on it. In 1870, in the wake of Emancipation and Reconstruction, there was a debate in the Senate over whether to remove the racial prerequisite from citizenship; but in the end the Reconstruction drive to wipe out the racial-law legacy of slavery ran up against the rising nativist sentiment against Chinese immigration in the West. And in the event, the bill that they passed never struck out the racial prerequisite; it just added aliens of African nativity and … persons of African descent as a second racial category that could be admitted. For the next 80 years, a series of prerequisite cases in the federal courts — beginning with In Re Ah Yup — repeatedly affirmed that skin color absolutely mattered to a person’s eligibility for American citizenship, and then litigated over and over again the sometimes porous legal and social boundaries of just who counted as white. (For example, Chinese and Japanese immigrants did not; Mexican immigrants did. For many immigrant groups, including Arabs and South Asians, different courts made numerous, sometimes inconsistent rulings. A good, standard reference on this series of cases is Ian F. Haney-Lopez’s White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race.) Gradually Congress added more racial groups in addition to white and black, but this basic framework — of a limited number of racial categories allowed to become naturalized citizens, and everyone else ruled ineligible to citizenship — remained the core of American naturalization law until racial bars were finally repealed by the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1952.

There is no question that for the first century and a half of its existence, the United States government was explicitly a racial state, and that race and skin color were explicit conditions on citizenship and political participation. This shouldn’t be surprising: before the Civil War, the United States was a slaveholding nation. After the Civil War, immigration exclusion and Jim Crow increasingly reinscribed systems of racial categorization into the law.

I hope it should go without saying that this is not any kind of argument in favor of race or skin color as a condition of citizenship. The fact that the United States had a long tradition of racially discriminatory citizenship laws isn’t any reason to think kindly of the traditional, white supremacist approach. It’s a reason to think worse of the United States government, and to be much more skeptical of traditional American patriotism. Whatever deeper values Dionne may think were present in the American system, at some other level, and however much he may think that the old racial prerequisite law was an aberration or an inconsistency, there is no way that you can reasonably pretend that It didn’t matter what the color of your skin was without substituting a sort of aspirational self-identity for the much messier historical fact.

]]>http://thegarrisoncenter.org/?p=11481Jamie Dimon is Right to Fear CryptocurrencyThomas L. Knapp2017-09-22T15:58:00+00:00Continue reading Jamie Dimon is Right to Fear Cryptocurrency→]]>Bitcoin (stock photo from http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com, CC0 license)

When JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a “fraud,” what ensued looked a lot like a “poop and scoop” con: The practice of driving down a thing’s price by saying bad things about it, then buying up a bunch of it before the price bounces back. After Dimon’s comments, JPMorgan briefly became one of the cryptocurrency’s biggest buyers. The company claims it was purchasing Bitcoin on behalf of clients, not as corporate policy, but it looked bad.

Now Dimon is badmouthing cryptocurrency again. And, as before, he clearly either has no idea what he’s talking about or has sinister motives.

“It’s creating something out of nothing that to me is worth nothing,” Dimon told CNBC. “It will end badly.” He also warned that as cryptocurrencies become more popular, government crackdowns will drive them into the black market (that’s happening in China right now).

The key words in Dimon’s “to me [it’s] worth nothing” are “to me.” Value is subjective. What’s a thing worth? Whatever it’s worth to you, or to me, or to Jamie Dimon. Each of us may find that thing more valuable, or less, than do the other two.

Dimon considers cryptocurrency “worth nothing” for one reason only: Because his company — the largest bank in the United States and among the largest in the world — doesn’t control it. And that’s one of several reasons why others find it very valuable indeed.

Cryptocurrencies run on blockchains, “distributed ledgers” without central authorities. Dimon prefers fiat currencies, which are created by governments, managed by central banks, and funneled through institutions like his, legally privileged choke points taking generous rake-offs from wealth created by others but forced to pass through them.

Neither crypto nor fiat currencies are backed by physical commodities like gold or silver, but the resemblance ends there. Crypto is backed by the work of maintaining its ledgers, called by the imaginative name “mining.” Fiat currency is backed only by your trust in the governments (and the Jamie Dimons) of the world.

“Creating money out of thin air without government backing is very different from money with government backing,” he says. He’s right. Money with government backing pays Jamie Dimon. Cryptocurrency threatens his business, his paycheck and his way of life.

His prediction of government crackdowns isn’t just a prediction, it’s a fervent wish. He’s desperate to see cryptocurrency crushed, unless he can find a way to force it through the JPMorgan toll booth.

Dimon should be careful what he wishes for. If cryptocurrency is forced entirely into the “black market,” that market will, sooner or later, bury his. His only chance is to co-opt blockchain and cryptocurrency methods into the fiat system. Here’s hoping he fails.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-3907410988822167329A Cool New Way to Support KN@PPSTER!Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-19T21:35:00+00:00the last episode of The KN@PP Stir Podcast that I might try to implement this -- and it's done.

Short version: If you'd like to support my work without any real effort or great cost on your party, you can go here to lend me your CPU time to mine Monero (a popular cryptocurrency).

Slightly longer version:

The page (here's the link again) contains a Javascript Monero miner. Whenever you're thinking about how much you'd like to support KN@PPSTER (I know you think that, a lot), and also happen to be planning to be away from your computer for a bit, just click that link (it's also over in the sidebar!), start the miner, and go get yourself a drink, catch a movie, whatever. While you're away, your computer will be earning a little cryptocurrency for yours truly.

If you'd rather just mine for yourself in the same way, you can grab the miner from Coin Hive, and here's a YouTube video with helpful instructions and a simple template for setting stuff up (the Coin Hive site made it kind of complicated).

]]>the last episode of The KN@PP Stir Podcast that I might try to implement this -- and it's done.

Short version: If you'd like to support my work without any real effort or great cost on your party, you can go here to lend me your CPU time to mine Monero (a popular cryptocurrency).

Slightly longer version:

The page (here's the link again) contains a Javascript Monero miner. Whenever you're thinking about how much you'd like to support KN@PPSTER (I know you think that, a lot), and also happen to be planning to be away from your computer for a bit, just click that link (it's also over in the sidebar!), start the miner, and go get yourself a drink, catch a movie, whatever. While you're away, your computer will be earning a little cryptocurrency for yours truly.

If you'd rather just mine for yourself in the same way, you can grab the miner from Coin Hive, and here's a YouTube video with helpful instructions and a simple template for setting stuff up (the Coin Hive site made it kind of complicated).

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-7690349359775370496Thanks For Asking! -- 09/19/17Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-19T14:03:00+00:00Scott Horton's new book, Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. No, I haven't actually read it yet, but I will soon and you should too.

Procedure recap:

Ask me anything (yes, anything) in the comment thread below this post; and

Shared Article from Prudentia

It's educational to keep friends around who disagree with you. ... Disagreeing, if not disagreeable, friends make you a better person and a better sci…

Deirdre McCloskey @ deirdremccloskey.org

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-2892322516779797599The KN@PP Stir Podcast, Episode 137: OK, Irmageddon Over it NowThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-18T21:44:00+00:00Minds.com, a social media site that I think you'll like (yes, it's a referral link). Check it out.

Shared Article from latimes.com

A near-future war with two clear sides is about as likely as a war with the Moon.

latimes.com

A.: Probably not.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-3300107790987982044Home Again, Home Again ...Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-15T17:38:00+00:00We're back in the house. Power has been restored, there's a tarp over the damaged roof, contractors will be in tomorrow to start fixing stuff. We don't have water at the moment because something caused a controller/pressure unit to burn up, but we do have electricity. The landlord's property manager is acting with alacrity to get things done, for which I am grateful.

Last week, I mentioned that I hadn't seen any "price-gouging" going on around Gainesville in the run-up to the hurricane. This morning, I ran up against a bit of what I would call "price-gouging." It was, unsurprisingly, driven by government. Specifically, the University of Florida's athletics program. Here's the rundown:

After several days of sheltering at our church, we were able to find a hotel room for two nights at a reasonable price (less than $100 per night -- there are cheaper places in Gainesville, but they were full up; a lot of people wanted to vacate them, but until Wednesday couldn't find gas to get out of town).

As of last night, we weren't certain whether we would need, or be able to get, a room for tonight. We had a text message from a neighbor letting us know that the power was back on, but we weren't certain if OUR wiring had been damaged (doesn't seem to have been -- or at least the trailer hasn't burned down around me since turning things back on).

So anyway, this morning, Tamara went down to the desk to see if a room would be available tonight. The answer: Maybe, maybe not, but if so it would be about $250 per night rather than less than $100 per night. Because ...

... the University of Florida Gators have a football game tomorrow.

Whenever that happens, every hotel in town sells out at inflated prices because the whole city is full of fans, alumni, etc. The campus is filled with alumni RVs, and the people without RVs rent hotel rooms.

I can't blame the hoteliers for pricing accordingly. And fortunately we were able to get back into our home. But I know there were people staying in the same hotel as us from Miami, Naples, Tampa, etc. -- people whose homes may be inaccessible or even destroyed and who will be either unable to find a room or be charged twice as much for tonight as they were for last night.

UF is not taking cognizance of a continuing situation which is an emergency for at least some people. And they are actually hurting those hoteliers, who could be sold out at regular rates to hurricane-displaced people right now and sell out at the higher rates for a re-scheduled football game.

Here's the letter I just sent to the editor of the Gainesville Sun (conforming to their length limit of 150 words):

It's awe-inspiring to see how people can come together to help each other in the wake of a natural disaster like Hurricane Irma.

It's less awe-inspiring to watch the University of Florida insist on an immediate return to its high financial ritual of having students toss a piece of pigskin around a pasture.

I saw no storm-related "price-gouging" in Gainesville's private sector, but in the public sector, UF's actions encourage local hotels to jack up their rates and evict non-recreational guests for the express purpose of parting alumni and other fans from their money.

The University could have exercised some simple civic virtue and common sense. Waiting a week would have made a big difference to storm survivors who are on the road back south or whose homes in this area are damaged/uninhabitable. But with UF, the almighty dollar apparently comes first.

]]>We're back in the house. Power has been restored, there's a tarp over the damaged roof, contractors will be in tomorrow to start fixing stuff. We don't have water at the moment because something caused a controller/pressure unit to burn up, but we do have electricity. The landlord's property manager is acting with alacrity to get things done, for which I am grateful.

Last week, I mentioned that I hadn't seen any "price-gouging" going on around Gainesville in the run-up to the hurricane. This morning, I ran up against a bit of what I would call "price-gouging." It was, unsurprisingly, driven by government. Specifically, the University of Florida's athletics program. Here's the rundown:

After several days of sheltering at our church, we were able to find a hotel room for two nights at a reasonable price (less than $100 per night -- there are cheaper places in Gainesville, but they were full up; a lot of people wanted to vacate them, but until Wednesday couldn't find gas to get out of town).

As of last night, we weren't certain whether we would need, or be able to get, a room for tonight. We had a text message from a neighbor letting us know that the power was back on, but we weren't certain if OUR wiring had been damaged (doesn't seem to have been -- or at least the trailer hasn't burned down around me since turning things back on).

So anyway, this morning, Tamara went down to the desk to see if a room would be available tonight. The answer: Maybe, maybe not, but if so it would be about $250 per night rather than less than $100 per night. Because ...

... the University of Florida Gators have a football game tomorrow.

Whenever that happens, every hotel in town sells out at inflated prices because the whole city is full of fans, alumni, etc. The campus is filled with alumni RVs, and the people without RVs rent hotel rooms.

I can't blame the hoteliers for pricing accordingly. And fortunately we were able to get back into our home. But I know there were people staying in the same hotel as us from Miami, Naples, Tampa, etc. -- people whose homes may be inaccessible or even destroyed and who will be either unable to find a room or be charged twice as much for tonight as they were for last night.

UF is not taking cognizance of a continuing situation which is an emergency for at least some people. And they are actually hurting those hoteliers, who could be sold out at regular rates to hurricane-displaced people right now and sell out at the higher rates for a re-scheduled football game.

Here's the letter I just sent to the editor of the Gainesville Sun (conforming to their length limit of 150 words):

It's awe-inspiring to see how people can come together to help each other in the wake of a natural disaster like Hurricane Irma.

It's less awe-inspiring to watch the University of Florida insist on an immediate return to its high financial ritual of having students toss a piece of pigskin around a pasture.

I saw no storm-related "price-gouging" in Gainesville's private sector, but in the public sector, UF's actions encourage local hotels to jack up their rates and evict non-recreational guests for the express purpose of parting alumni and other fans from their money.

The University could have exercised some simple civic virtue and common sense. Waiting a week would have made a big difference to storm survivors who are on the road back south or whose homes in this area are damaged/uninhabitable. But with UF, the almighty dollar apparently comes first.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-1731468626109365897Word PSAThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-14T20:19:00+00:00Store close -- no electricityPool close until further noticeIf something is not open -- that is, if it is shut -- it is closed, not close.

Looks like it damaged two trusses on its way in. You can't really see in this picture, but in the very upper left hand corner there's actually a limb poking through the ceiling. Another limb looks like it fell on our central air/heat unit and bounced off. Because I can't be certain there wasn't any electrical damage (e.g. wires stripped and crushed together that might short and cause a fire), I have the master breaker turned off (no telling when power will be restored to the neighborhood -- there are lines down all over).

Hopefully we'll hear about repair ETAs from the landlord in the next day or two. We'll probably go looking for an extended stay hotel situation today and plan on being there for up to a week in any case. Once we get settled in somewhere with real electricity and wi-fi instead of a generator powering a phone hot spot, I'll be full-on back at work and posting regularly.

Hey, if you're a reader who was in the storm's path, let everyone know you made it OK!

Looks like it damaged two trusses on its way in. You can't really see in this picture, but in the very upper left hand corner there's actually a limb poking through the ceiling. Another limb looks like it fell on our central air/heat unit and bounced off. Because I can't be certain there wasn't any electrical damage (e.g. wires stripped and crushed together that might short and cause a fire), I have the master breaker turned off (no telling when power will be restored to the neighborhood -- there are lines down all over).

Hopefully we'll hear about repair ETAs from the landlord in the next day or two. We'll probably go looking for an extended stay hotel situation today and plan on being there for up to a week in any case. Once we get settled in somewhere with real electricity and wi-fi instead of a generator powering a phone hot spot, I'll be full-on back at work and posting regularly.

Hey, if you're a reader who was in the storm's path, let everyone know you made it OK!

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-5278229638264072090The Plan -- Final VersionThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-10T12:09:00+00:00Main contributing factor to the decision: We still don't know where the storm is going to go, or how strong it's going to be when it gets there, but as commenter mrjarrell pointed out in comments on another post, our planned evac destination -- Tupelo, Mississippi -- was actually in the storm's late "probability cone," and even though it would be weaker by the time it got there, we would be trading hurricane conditions for tornado conditions. We thought about making a boogie more due west for Gulfport, Biloxi, New Orleans or Baton Rouge ...

... but, you know, screw it. We've got reliable shelter and good friends available here, versus harried travel with no certainty that trading one location for another would end up being an improvement. Also, we would have been leaving about now if we were evacuating. Staying, we've got another good eight hours to continue prepping the house for a hit, and then a three-minute drive to get to the shelter well before even the outer edges of Irma start approaching.

So: I will be online, here or at the shelter, as time allows and until after power goes out, cell towers go down, whatever, and back on as soon as humanly possible after that. All of you who are also in the storm's path, here's hoping you make it through in safety and in health.

]]>Main contributing factor to the decision: We still don't know where the storm is going to go, or how strong it's going to be when it gets there, but as commenter mrjarrell pointed out in comments on another post, our planned evac destination -- Tupelo, Mississippi -- was actually in the storm's late "probability cone," and even though it would be weaker by the time it got there, we would be trading hurricane conditions for tornado conditions. We thought about making a boogie more due west for Gulfport, Biloxi, New Orleans or Baton Rouge ...

... but, you know, screw it. We've got reliable shelter and good friends available here, versus harried travel with no certainty that trading one location for another would end up being an improvement. Also, we would have been leaving about now if we were evacuating. Staying, we've got another good eight hours to continue prepping the house for a hit, and then a three-minute drive to get to the shelter well before even the outer edges of Irma start approaching.

So: I will be online, here or at the shelter, as time allows and until after power goes out, cell towers go down, whatever, and back on as soon as humanly possible after that. All of you who are also in the storm's path, here's hoping you make it through in safety and in health.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-2014297104398649506No "Price Gouging" in the Gainesville Area Yet ...Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-09T12:41:00+00:00Some items are in short supply. The shelves everywhere are empty of bread, and it's hard to find batteries or bottled water.

One of the items on our list was "more water, if we see any" (we thought we could use one more case, wanted one to give our older neighbor who insists on weathering the storm in situ, and any more could be dropped off at our church, which is operating as a shelter). We didn't expect to find any water, but we were keeping an eye out for it.

The store is located on a small highway that runs north out of Tampa. Lots of traffic, and probably 100 vehicles lined up for gas at the convenience store next door. But when we walked in, there were pallets of bottled water ... priced at $2.50 cents per case of 24 16.9 oz. bottles. Limit two cases per customer, but certainly not any "price gouging" going on.

Same thing in Gainesville -- if you can find the things you're looking for, the stores aren't doing disaster pricing. But they are closing down. Some today, most starting tomorrow.

Our plans are still contingent on the forecasts.

As of tomorrow morning, if it looks like Irma will hit Gainesville as a Category 3 storm or higher, we plan to head for northern Mississippi using back roads (the freeways are pretty much parking lots; the smaller roads look busy, but not nearly as bad). I'll be packing today with that in mind.

If it looks like we'll get by with Category 2, we'll go to our church, which is a nice stout building and pet friendly.

If Category 1, we'll either ride it out at the house or go to the church.

I'll try to get a podcast out some time today, because I don't want to break my new weekly streak. If you've got any questions for Thanks For Asking!, get them in ASAP.

One of the items on our list was "more water, if we see any" (we thought we could use one more case, wanted one to give our older neighbor who insists on weathering the storm in situ, and any more could be dropped off at our church, which is operating as a shelter). We didn't expect to find any water, but we were keeping an eye out for it.

The store is located on a small highway that runs north out of Tampa. Lots of traffic, and probably 100 vehicles lined up for gas at the convenience store next door. But when we walked in, there were pallets of bottled water ... priced at $2.50 cents per case of 24 16.9 oz. bottles. Limit two cases per customer, but certainly not any "price gouging" going on.

Same thing in Gainesville -- if you can find the things you're looking for, the stores aren't doing disaster pricing. But they are closing down. Some today, most starting tomorrow.

Our plans are still contingent on the forecasts.

As of tomorrow morning, if it looks like Irma will hit Gainesville as a Category 3 storm or higher, we plan to head for northern Mississippi using back roads (the freeways are pretty much parking lots; the smaller roads look busy, but not nearly as bad). I'll be packing today with that in mind.

If it looks like we'll get by with Category 2, we'll go to our church, which is a nice stout building and pet friendly.

If Category 1, we'll either ride it out at the house or go to the church.

I'll try to get a podcast out some time today, because I don't want to break my new weekly streak. If you've got any questions for Thanks For Asking!, get them in ASAP.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-9116687410722475980Request to @Amazon and @Google: Play Nice, PleaseThomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-08T02:19:00+00:00Amazon Fire TV Stick, especially now that they've updated its operating system to let me limit the bandwidth/resolution so that I'm not eating up gigabytes watching HD video when SD is just peachy.

I also love Google Play, mostly for the apps for my Android phone, but also for its book and movie stores. I rack up Google Play credit using the Google Opinion Rewardsapp, and spend that credit on stuff, including movies. So far so good.

Amazon Fire TV does not offer a Google Play app. I understand there are ways to "sideload" unapproved apps onto the device, but I'm not big on the idea. I also understand that for the most part, Amazon would prefer to sell movies itself rather than route you to another seller (there's not a Vudu app for Fire TV either, for example). OK, fine. If I want to watch a movie from Google Play on my TV, I can just plug the old original ChromeCast in and mirror it from my computer screen. Pain in the ass, but whatever.

But earlier today, I noticed that my Google Play movies show up in my YouTube account and that I can watch them on YouTube. Hey, there is a YouTube app for Fire TV!

Run the app. Activate my YouTube account on the app. Hey, there are my Google Play movies! Huzzah!

This video cannot be played on this device.

Now, to be fair, I have no way of knowing whether Amazon is refusing to let its device play a Google Play movie, or whether Google Play is refusing to let an Amazon device play its movies. I suspect the former, but that's just a suspicion.

Hey, guys, why don't you work things out? I know that each of you wants to dominate the various device/app spaces, but your customers are going to want to mix and match.

]]>Amazon Fire TV Stick, especially now that they've updated its operating system to let me limit the bandwidth/resolution so that I'm not eating up gigabytes watching HD video when SD is just peachy.

I also love Google Play, mostly for the apps for my Android phone, but also for its book and movie stores. I rack up Google Play credit using the Google Opinion Rewardsapp, and spend that credit on stuff, including movies. So far so good.

Amazon Fire TV does not offer a Google Play app. I understand there are ways to "sideload" unapproved apps onto the device, but I'm not big on the idea. I also understand that for the most part, Amazon would prefer to sell movies itself rather than route you to another seller (there's not a Vudu app for Fire TV either, for example). OK, fine. If I want to watch a movie from Google Play on my TV, I can just plug the old original ChromeCast in and mirror it from my computer screen. Pain in the ass, but whatever.

But earlier today, I noticed that my Google Play movies show up in my YouTube account and that I can watch them on YouTube. Hey, there is a YouTube app for Fire TV!

Run the app. Activate my YouTube account on the app. Hey, there are my Google Play movies! Huzzah!

This video cannot be played on this device.

Now, to be fair, I have no way of knowing whether Amazon is refusing to let its device play a Google Play movie, or whether Google Play is refusing to let an Amazon device play its movies. I suspect the former, but that's just a suspicion.

Hey, guys, why don't you work things out? I know that each of you wants to dominate the various device/app spaces, but your customers are going to want to mix and match.

Amazon HQ2 will be Amazon’s second headquarters in North America. We expect to invest over $5 billion in construction and grow this second headquarters to include as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs – it will be a full equal to our current campus in Seattle. In addition to Amazon’s direct hiring and investment, construction and ongoing operation of Amazon HQ2 is expected to create tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community.

LEVY COUNTY, FLORIDA, PLZ

Hear me out.

Levy County is convenient to a university city (Gainesville) full of prospective "you need a degree for this job" hires, as well as the college dropouts who actually get things done while the people with degrees wave their degrees around and yell about how qualified they are. It's also within a few hours of Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Miami. There are a range of living prices/lifestyles within commuting distance of, say, Bronson.

The area is economically depressed by comparison to much of the country (the turpentine industry died out and the nuclear power plants got canceled). That means cheap land and competitive bidding by contractors for a campus, as well as lots of people looking for the kind of work that doesn't require suit and tie (you're going to need janitors, cafeteria employees, security, etc.).

Aside from the opportunity to work at Amazon, what would attract the people you're looking for? To start with, how about no income tax and pretty low property taxes? Plus being within a few hours of the best schools and the best vacation spots in the country (or out -- quick flights to the Bahamas)? If people will live in a hell-hole like California for the opportunity to work for companies like Google, presumably they'll be willing to live in a nice place to work for Amazon.

Instead of trying to fit into an already heavily populated area, Amazon should do its own thing. Like the man said, build it (YOUR way) and they will come.

This is something of an admission against interest in that I'd love to buy some property and build a house out in Levy County before it gets discovered and becomes expensive. Maybe you'll hire me as a location scout or something so I can afford to do that.

Amazon HQ2 will be Amazon’s second headquarters in North America. We expect to invest over $5 billion in construction and grow this second headquarters to include as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs – it will be a full equal to our current campus in Seattle. In addition to Amazon’s direct hiring and investment, construction and ongoing operation of Amazon HQ2 is expected to create tens of thousands of additional jobs and tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in the surrounding community.

LEVY COUNTY, FLORIDA, PLZ

Hear me out.

Levy County is convenient to a university city (Gainesville) full of prospective "you need a degree for this job" hires, as well as the college dropouts who actually get things done while the people with degrees wave their degrees around and yell about how qualified they are. It's also within a few hours of Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Miami. There are a range of living prices/lifestyles within commuting distance of, say, Bronson.

The area is economically depressed by comparison to much of the country (the turpentine industry died out and the nuclear power plants got canceled). That means cheap land and competitive bidding by contractors for a campus, as well as lots of people looking for the kind of work that doesn't require suit and tie (you're going to need janitors, cafeteria employees, security, etc.).

Aside from the opportunity to work at Amazon, what would attract the people you're looking for? To start with, how about no income tax and pretty low property taxes? Plus being within a few hours of the best schools and the best vacation spots in the country (or out -- quick flights to the Bahamas)? If people will live in a hell-hole like California for the opportunity to work for companies like Google, presumably they'll be willing to live in a nice place to work for Amazon.

Instead of trying to fit into an already heavily populated area, Amazon should do its own thing. Like the man said, build it (YOUR way) and they will come.

This is something of an admission against interest in that I'd love to buy some property and build a house out in Levy County before it gets discovered and becomes expensive. Maybe you'll hire me as a location scout or something so I can afford to do that.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-4729953797530635597Regarding Disaster Preparedness, Part 2Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-07T02:00:00+00:00S'More is an app that runs ads on your Android phone's lock screen. Not very intrusive. All it means is that when you go to unlock your phone there's an extra swipe involved. For which you earn 10 cents a day, redeemable in the form of "gift cards" for Amazon and a bunch of other places. IIRC, the redemption minimum is $3.00, or one month of letting the app run. I've successfully redeemed for Amazon cards several times.

Ibotta is a "cash back" app that works at a whole bunch of stores (I usually use it at my local Walmart, Publix, Sam's Club or Dollar General). Look up the kinds of things you're shopping for, choose your rebates, go shopping, then take a picture of your receipt and, in some cases, scan bar codes. Your cash back gets credited to your account and once you're racked up $20 or more you can redeem it as cash (via PayPal or Venmo) or for gift cards (Amazon, etc.). I've successfully redeemed for Amazon cards twice now.

Neither of these apps is a lot of work, and both generate a little extra money -- money which came in handy when I realized I'd like to have a few things around the house for Irmageddon. Check them out.

]]>S'More is an app that runs ads on your Android phone's lock screen. Not very intrusive. All it means is that when you go to unlock your phone there's an extra swipe involved. For which you earn 10 cents a day, redeemable in the form of "gift cards" for Amazon and a bunch of other places. IIRC, the redemption minimum is $3.00, or one month of letting the app run. I've successfully redeemed for Amazon cards several times.

Ibotta is a "cash back" app that works at a whole bunch of stores (I usually use it at my local Walmart, Publix, Sam's Club or Dollar General). Look up the kinds of things you're shopping for, choose your rebates, go shopping, then take a picture of your receipt and, in some cases, scan bar codes. Your cash back gets credited to your account and once you're racked up $20 or more you can redeem it as cash (via PayPal or Venmo) or for gift cards (Amazon, etc.). I've successfully redeemed for Amazon cards twice now.

Neither of these apps is a lot of work, and both generate a little extra money -- money which came in handy when I realized I'd like to have a few things around the house for Irmageddon. Check them out.

If you have a smart phone (Android or iOS) and you don't have Cell 411, you should get it. You can form private or public "cells" to easily let people know what's going on -- anything from a flat tire to an unexpected police encounter (you can stream that live so that confiscating your phone won't erase the evidence) to coordinating ride-sharing.

If you have a smart phone (Android or iOS) and you don't have Cell 411, you should get it. You can form private or public "cells" to easily let people know what's going on -- anything from a flat tire to an unexpected police encounter (you can stream that live so that confiscating your phone won't erase the evidence) to coordinating ride-sharing.

]]>tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8483866.post-2546466309085995953Looks Like It's On ...Thomas Knapphttps://plus.google.com/111504967155808803906noreply@blogger.com2017-09-06T01:21:00+00:00"Mandatory evacuation order" for the Florida Keys starting tomorrow morning. Irma has strengthened into a Category 5 storm. Its most likely predicted paths seem to be:

Up the Atlantic Coast of Florida;

Up the Gulf Coast of Florida; or

Straight up the middle of Florida

Which, any way you cut it, probably means us (we're in north central Florida, about 50 miles from the Gulf Coast, 80 or so from the Atlantic, and it's going to be a big, wide storm). So we're stocking up on water and canned goods and food that doesn't have to be cooked in the expectation that we may spend a few days without electricity (I'm all for taking off on a quickie vacation to, say, Montana, but that doesn't really seem to be in the cards and I expect northbound I-75 to be clogged by tomorrow if it's not already).

Speaking of stocking up, I decided to do some of that via InstaCart. You order (from local stores), they deliver. The prices are a little higher than at the store, but I had a coupon for $50 off an order of $50 or more, plus free delivery, so it came out pretty nicely, and saved us part of the water toting (part of my order was five cases of 24 16.9-oz. bottles). By the time I post this, the delivery will have arrived (placed it around 4pm and scheduled delivery for between 8pm and 9pm), so if you see this it means I was happy with the service.* Yes, you guessed it, referral link time. The first five people I refer each get a $10 credit toward their first order, and I get a $10 credit toward my next order.

If I should suddenly disappear from Internet view this weekend, you'll know why -- expect me back when power is restored and so forth. If you're in this storm's path, or any other, or have been recently (yes, I'm talking to you readers in Texas), best wishes.

* I'm VERY happy with the service. The stores are already madhouses and the InstaCart lady said she had gone to four different stores to fill orders. She made some (good and proper) substitutions for items that were out of stock, and I got a refund for the five cases of bottled water I had ordered as there was none to be found. Gonna be out looking for some tomorrow (we've got SOME, but I want MORE).

]]>"Mandatory evacuation order" for the Florida Keys starting tomorrow morning. Irma has strengthened into a Category 5 storm. Its most likely predicted paths seem to be:

Up the Atlantic Coast of Florida;

Up the Gulf Coast of Florida; or

Straight up the middle of Florida

Which, any way you cut it, probably means us (we're in north central Florida, about 50 miles from the Gulf Coast, 80 or so from the Atlantic, and it's going to be a big, wide storm). So we're stocking up on water and canned goods and food that doesn't have to be cooked in the expectation that we may spend a few days without electricity (I'm all for taking off on a quickie vacation to, say, Montana, but that doesn't really seem to be in the cards and I expect northbound I-75 to be clogged by tomorrow if it's not already).

Speaking of stocking up, I decided to do some of that via InstaCart. You order (from local stores), they deliver. The prices are a little higher than at the store, but I had a coupon for $50 off an order of $50 or more, plus free delivery, so it came out pretty nicely, and saved us part of the water toting (part of my order was five cases of 24 16.9-oz. bottles). By the time I post this, the delivery will have arrived (placed it around 4pm and scheduled delivery for between 8pm and 9pm), so if you see this it means I was happy with the service.* Yes, you guessed it, referral link time. The first five people I refer each get a $10 credit toward their first order, and I get a $10 credit toward my next order.

If I should suddenly disappear from Internet view this weekend, you'll know why -- expect me back when power is restored and so forth. If you're in this storm's path, or any other, or have been recently (yes, I'm talking to you readers in Texas), best wishes.

* I'm VERY happy with the service. The stores are already madhouses and the InstaCart lady said she had gone to four different stores to fill orders. She made some (good and proper) substitutions for items that were out of stock, and I got a refund for the five cases of bottled water I had ordered as there was none to be found. Gonna be out looking for some tomorrow (we've got SOME, but I want MORE).